Alessandro Duranti

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Anthropology

Politeness is Political relates how the establishment of Western democratic regimes in the late 18th century found resistance among thinkers for whom politeness was a cherished social virtue. Such thinkers saw politeness as an ideal, relational morality misunderstood by those who would entrust all authority to laws alone. According to partisans of...

Many of Heidegger’s statements about language should sound familiar to linguistic anthropologists, starting with the pragmatic‐indexical functions of speaking (in Sein und Zeit ) and continuing, in later years, with something resembling linguistic relativity. But a comparison of Heidegger’s ideas with those of some of his contemporaries who wrote a...

A reassessment of the concept of intentions in philosophy, especially in phenomenology, and its critique within linguistic anthropology, with some examples from the US.

A review of the concept of indexicality and its use in linguistic anthropology, with some new examples.

In this article, we suggest that in starting from dialogical, interactive studies of human discourse, we can uncover properties of cooperation that have otherwise been missed or have remained underappreciated by scholars trying to account for cooperation from an evolutionary point of view or from the point of view of its mental representation (i.e....

This book offers the first English translation of Henri Bergson’s Discours sur la Politesse as a starting point for reassessing the meaning and implications of the notion of politeness for the study of human sociality. Bergson’s short essay, originally delivered to French high school students in 1885 and then, again, in 1892, proposes a tripartite...

This book offers the first English translation of Henri Bergson’s Discours sur la Politesse as a starting point for reassessing the meaning and implications of the notion of politeness for the study of human sociality. Bergson’s short essay, originally delivered to French high school students in 1885 and then, again, in 1892, proposes a tripartite...

The interaction among a group of musicians before, during, and after the performance of a jazz standard is analyzed to show the interdependence of jazz aesthetics and jazz ethics. The authors argue that what makes jazz distinct from other kinds of musical traditions is not just the ubiquity of improvisation in the genre but the vulnerability that j...

Improvisation is a ubiquitous aspect of both everyday and ritualized interactions. When composing utterances, speakers draw from a vast repertoire of expressions and patterns that allows for spontaneous invention across a range of situations and contexts. This entry explains how one's ability to improvise varies along a continuum and is made possib...

Improvisation is a ubiquitous aspect of both everyday and ritualized interactions. When composing utterances, speakers draw from a vast repertoire of expressions and patterns that allows for spontaneous invention across a range of situations and contexts. This entry explains how one's ability to improvise varies along a continuum and is made possib...

Comment on Enfield, N. J. and Jack Sidnell. 2017. The concept of action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Response to comments on Duranti, Alessandro. 2015. The anthropology of intentions: Language in a world of others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Citation: Duranti, Alessandro (2016), " Postfazione. Sul dono " , in Laura Santone (a cura di), Il dono come paradigma linguistico-culturale, mediAzioni 20, http://mediazioni.sitlec.unibo.it, ISSN 1974-4382. I saggi di questa raccolta dimostrano sia l'attualità del tema del dono che la ricchezza concettuale del modello dei tre obblighi individuati...

How and to what extent do people take into account the intentions of others? Alessandro Duranti sets out to answer this question, showing that the role of intentions in human interaction is variable across cultures and contexts. Through careful analysis of data collected over three decades in US and Pacific societies, Duranti demonstrates that, in...

This article proposes an analysis of a ritual glitch and resulting “misfire” from the standpoint of a phenomenologically informed anthropology of human interaction. Through articulating a synthesis of some of Husserl‘s insights on attention and affection with concepts and methods developed by anthropologists and other students of human interaction,...

Building on the author's participant observation in academic leadership roles over the last two decades, this article reviews four areas of engagement for anthropology within the larger context of US higher education: a) fundraising; b) training and placing of students; c) the so-called 'corporate turn' and its alleged effects on current evaluation...

IntroductionRepetition versus VariationImprovisation as Flexibility in Execution of TasksPlay and Other Creative BehaviorsThe Ubiquity of ImprovisationImprovisation as Patterned BehaviorThe Evaluation and Sanctioning of ImprovisationConclusions References

In this article, the notion of intersubjectivity is re-examined by going back to its original formulation by the philosopher Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century. On the basis of a careful reading of Husserl's books and lecture notes, four claims are put forward that help clarify in what sense intersubjectivity is a broader and more...

This article suggests that the theory of language socialization could benefit from adopting some key concepts originally introduced by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in the first part of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on Husserl's notion of “(phenomenological) modification,” to be understood as a change in “the natural attitude” t...

Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader is a comprehensive collection of the best work that has been published in this exciting and growing area of anthropology, and is organized to provide a guide to key issues in the study of language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice.Revised and updated, this second edition contains eight new...

Drawing from two research projects, one carried out in (Western) Samoa and the other in a jazz program in a US university, the article compares the complex and apparently contradictory attitudes that members of each community have toward literacy and orality. It is argued that their common negative stance toward the use of literacy in certain conte...

Drawing from two research projects, one carried out in (Western) Samoa and the other in a jazz program in a US university, the article compares the complex and apparently contradictory attitudes that members of each community have toward literacy and orality. It is argued that their common negative stance toward the use of literacy in certain conte...

Keywords: Language as culture, history of anthropology in the U.S., American Indian languages, linguistic diversity, linguistic relativity, the ethnography of communication, language socialization, indexicality, heteroglossia.

The literature on greetings includes several commonly made claims that require an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a greeting exchange. I propose six criteria for identifying greetings across languages and speech communities. Applying these criteria to a speech community in Western Samoa, I identify four types of greeting exchanges there....

The articles in this special collection give us an opportunity to further reflect on a central concern for any discipline dedicated to the study of human action, namely, the role that introspection plays in giving us insights into what people think, feel, and want. The starting point of this discussion is the observation that members of a number of...

A World of Others' Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Richard Bauman. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004. 184 pp.

IntroductionToward a Definition of AgencyTwo Dimensions of AgencyEncoding of AgencyMitigation of AgencyConclusions

A handbook on recent advancements and the state of the art in array processing and sensor Networks Handbook on Array Processing and Sensor Networks provides readers with a collection of tutorial articles contributed by world-renowned experts on recent advancements and the state of the art in array processing and sensor networks. Focusing on fundame...

Over the last 50 years the process of producing transcripts of all kinds of interactions has become an important practice for researchers in a wide range of disciplines. Only rarely, however, has transcription been analyzed as a cultural practice. It is here argued that it is precisely the lack of understanding of what is involved in transcribing t...

On the basis of data collected during a year-long study of a Congressional campaign in California in the mid-1990s, this article uses semantic, pragmatic, and narrative analysis to show how candidates for political office construct and defend the coherence of their actions, including their choice to run for office. First, semantic and pragmatic...

This article discusses the particular set of linguistic forms that linguists call "honorifics" as they are employed in two highly stratified Pacific societies, Pohnpei and Samoa. We show how members of these two societies creatively use honorifics and other semiotic resources to achieve and distribute social power and meaningful social difference a...

This article addresses the issue of how to develop a theory of interpretation of social action (discourse included) that takes into consideration culture-specific claims about intentions while simultaneously allowing for a pan-human, universal dimension of intentionality. It is argued that to achieve such a goal, it is necessary to agree on a basic...

Starting from the assumption that the ability to see patterns and thus abstract from actual events and properties of specific objects is universal, the article reviews different conceptualizations of and attitudes toward the terms ‘theory’ and ‘model’, identifying two co-existing and opposing tendencies: the love for details (originally praised by...

Based on the video recordings of the course “The Culture of Jazz Aesthetics,” taught at the University of California, Los Angeles by the two authors in collaboration with a number of local professional jazz musicians, this article discusses jazz musicians’ own understanding of what improvisation means to them. It shows that one key aspect of such u...

The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially...

Bilingualism is a concept that relies on a variety of theoretical constructs, including the notions of "language," "speakers," and "community." Subjecting these key notions to empirical and theoretical challenges, this study applies an anthropological approach to bilingualism's most emblematic phenomenon, code-switching. Audio-visual recordings of...

By extending the work of linguistic anthropologists on indexicality to transnational communities, this article shows how a simple instruction to "sit down" can be a way of making physically distant worlds emotionally and ethically close. Comparison of the use and context of this expression among Samoan speakers in two communities, a Western Samoan...

This paper analyzes Samoan ceremonial greetings and shows that, although their sequential organization recognizes only two parties - greeters and greeted - the internal organization of each part of the exchange acknowledges subtle individual differences in terms of status and ability to verbally perform. Participants routinely overlap one another w...

After examining three misconceptions of the concept of multiculturalisM., we introduce the concept of syncretic literacy to deal with how diverse cultural frameworks inform the organization of literacy activities by members of the Samoan American community in urban Los Angeles. On the basis of our earlier work in a rural Western Samoan community, w...

1. Rethinking Context: an introduction Charles Goodwin, and Alessandro Duranti 2. The indexical ground of Deictic Reference William F. Hanks 3. Language in context and language as context: the Samoan respect vocabulary Alessandro Duranti 4. Context contests: debatable truth statements on Tanna (Vanuatu) Lamont Lindstrom 5. Contextualization, tradit...

Madre madrina: Rituale, parentela e identità in un paese del Sannio (San Marco dei Cavoti). BERNARDINO PALUMBO Itinerari delle emozioni: Corpo e identità femminile nel Sannio Campano. MARIELLA PANDOLFI

Questions of intentionality and truth are constant worries in the daily work of constructing hypotheses about the intellectual focus and social behavior of the people ethnographers study. The very process of doing ethnography often implies asking ourselves and others questions regarding possible motivations, beliefs, explanations, and consequences...

Samoan ceremonial greetings both assume and reconstitute particular views of a hierarchical social order. At the same time, they also display a relatively fluid system in which negotiation of status and authority is frequent and one's ability to access the desired place in the social order is made perceptually available for public assessment. The c...

This article proposes that we integrate ethnographic with grammatical analysis in order to study the constitution of “agency” in legal and political discourse. Much of the political and juridical process of conflict management in a Samoan fono involves the definition of certain “facts” and the assignment of certain semantic roles to key participant...

A study investigated how Samoan adults use genitive constructions in comparison with use by four young children. Results suggest that while adults and children both favor a clausal strategy of highlighting the affected object in a manipulative activity scene, Samoan children have difficulty exploiting the grammar of genitive noun phrases to encode...

Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey is a comprehensive introduction to current research in all branches of the field of linguistics, from syntactic theory to ethnography of speaking, from signed language to the mental lexicon, from language acquisition to discourse analysis. Each chapter has been written by a specialist particularly distinguished in...

The universal validity of the personalist view of meaning as owned by the individual speaker and exclusively defined by his intentions is here questioned on the basis of an analysis of spontaneous verbal interaction in a politico-judiciary arena in a traditional village in Western Samoa. After relating the Samoan practice of language understanding...

From the point of view of their referential function, Italian subject pronouns do not seem to add any information to that already displayed by the verb morphology. From the point of view of sentence grammar, subject pronouns are said to convey contrast or emphasis. In this paper, it is claimed that the function of Italian subject pronouns must be s...

This paper addresses the relevance of a functional approach to the study of speech genres. The range of variation found in spontaneous performances of a traditional genre of Samoan speechmaking (lāuga) can be explained and partly predicted by referring to the social and cultural context of speaking. Particular features of variation are attributed t...

Dimensions of Sociolinguistics - CardonaGiorgio Raimondo, Introduzione all'etnolinguistica. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976. - Volume 9 Issue 1 - Allessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs

This study presents a view of diachronic change in language, according to which one of the fundamental factors motivating syntactic change is to be found in the conflicting interaction of principles determining the language organization. Specifically, it will be argued that principles of structural nature and principles of perceptual nature are in...

A collection of chapters on the grammatical patterns of a Bantu language

Traducción de: Linguistic Anthropology Duranti introduce la antropología lingüística como una ciencia independiente y aborda temas a la naturaleza del lenguaje como instrumento social y al habla como práctica cultural.

Incluye bibliografía e índice